When beginning any new writing project, I always reach for the dictionary. In addition to the word I'm looking up, equally valuable are nearby entries that fill the missing conceptual spaces created by the original word.

Different definitions of a word correspond to different levels of experience. For example, many of us think of creativity in psychological and practical terms, which are relatively familiar and not especially controversial; for example: "The quality of being able to produce original work or ideas in any field." A few entries up in the dictionary is creation, which seems more general than creativity: "An act of construction: the combining or organizing of existing materials into new form."

Another definition of creation taps more abstract areas and a grander scale. "The act of creation; especially, in a theological sense, the original act of God in bringing the world or universe into existence." This introduces religious and spiritual elements. Indeed, the creative process is often compared to a state of grace or deep meditative contemplation.1 Creating also may be the most obvious way in which we are made in God's image: producing "something" from "nothing."

In all cases, creativity manifests through its results, some of which are visible. But, what drives the creative process forward is interior, subjective, and invisible. The ability to contact and use these inner resources is necessary for creation.

Psychedelic drugs, or chemicals, some of which normally exist continuously in our bodies, affect consciousness in unique ways. To the extent our consciousness participates in the creative process, any means of modifying consciousness will impact creativity. Thus, there are both theoretical and practical implications regarding psychedelics and creativity. And, because of my research interest in psychedelics,2,3 I was asked to discuss this area further in this issue of SiteStreet.

Psychiatry, particularly the field of psychoanalysis, has always been interested in creativity. Psychoanalysis deals with depth, the fact that things are rarely as they seem. Its founder, Freud, described and popularized the unconscious, a fully functional mental life both out of our awareness and affecting us at all times. Freud's method of psychotherapy borrowed many of its techniques from hypnosis, inducing a light trance, through which psychoanalysts studied the unconscious mind through free association, slips of the tongue, humor, and dreams. Analysts thought that because much of creativity also appears to emerge from "deep inside," the unconscious must play an important role.

Similarly, psychoanalysis studied psychoses such as mania and schizophrenia, and validated our ancient recognition of the relationship between madness and creativity. Recent publications and films continue reinforcing our fascination with this link.4,5 In a curious twist, Freud's personal discomfort with examining mystical states precluded serious analytic inquiry into them. Left to their own devices, however, analysts could have found these states as interesting as psychoses.

Psychoanalysis dominated psychiatry for nearly a century. However, the discovery in the 1940's of the psychedelic drug, LSD, helped usher in the competing model of "biological psychiatry," now the leading paradigm in the field. This model proposes that brain chemistry, not an unconscious, determines our feelings, thoughts, behavior, and perceptions. Its practical application, "psychopharmacology," modifies these functions pharmacologically; that is, with drugs such as antidepressants, anti-anxiety agents, mood stabilizers, anti-psychotics, and stimulants.

While hallucinogen is the preferred medical/research term for the class of drugs of which LSD is the best known, psychedelic is more popular and probably more accurate. Hallucinations are not a hallmark of these drugs' effects, while psychedelic refers to their ability to "manifest" mental phenomena in new and unusual ways.

There are two major chemical families of psychedelic drugs. "Tryptamines" include psilocybin found in magic mushrooms, and DMT, or dimethyltryptamine.6 This latter compound is found in the psychedelic Amazon brew, ayahuasca. Mescaline from the peyote cactus, is the most well-known of the "phenethylamine" family of these drugs.

Psychedelics cause a unique constellation of subjective effects. They modify all those functions of consciousness that when combined, make us uniquely human: the ways in which we feel, perceive, and interpret our inner and outer worlds.

Under the influence of these drugs, all forms of perception are altered, especially the visual and auditory. New ideas, thoughts, and memories emerge. Emotions are intense and shift rapidly. The body changes shape, weight, and appearance, as does its relationship to the mind. Our sense of self, its nature and quality, is highly altered.7

Some early researchers saw these properties as inducing a "model psychosis," stimulating a syndrome in normal volunteers resembling naturally-occurring severe mental illnesses. Other research groups were more impressed with the mystical and transcendent qualities of the psychedelic state.

Whatever the relationship between psychosis or religious experience and the creative process, any tools for studying these relationships were important. Psychedelics were such tools, and it was a small conceptual step, then, to investigate their effects on creativity.

Unfortunately, there were only a handful of such research efforts. A 1960 Hungarian experiment using a moderately high dose of DET (a synthetic relative of DMT) found that 5 of 38 normal volunteers, who were already a professional and creative group, became inspired as a days-to-weeks incidental "after effect" of their research participation. The study itself did not involve creativity; rather, it examined DET's effects on brain-waves. The authors of this paper describe their subjects as experiencing "the rather passive state of accumulating impressions prior to creative work."8

In 1967, an American group described an LSD-creativity study in normal volunteers. The setting of this experiment was not geared towards optimizing aesthetic or creative experience, and took place in a sterile clinical research ward. Researchers did not tell subjects what drug they were getting until the morning of the study, and they provided little information about what to expect from the drug. They found that lower LSD doses were generally more successful than higher ones in raising scores on certain psychological tests that reflected psychoanalytic views of creativity.9

Another American, Oscar Janiger, performed informal creativity research with LSD in the 1950's and 1960's in his Los Angeles home. His best known project involved presenting a Hopi Kachina doll to artists who were under the influence of various doses of LSD, and allowing them to paint during their intoxication. While these data were not published in peer-reviewed journals, an upcoming book reviews Janiger's work in great detail.10

Results from the most well-executed and designed study to date appeared in 1966, from a team that worked in San Francisco and Stanford. Professionally employed male volunteers received extensive preparation and screening for explicitly stated research on how psychedelics might affect creativity. Low or moderate doses of either LSD or mescaline enhanced creative problem-solving, as assessed by subjective reports, and the practical applicability of the solutions they came to during the experiment. There also seemed to be a carry-over of enhanced creativity for at least some weeks after sessions.11

Unfortunately for scientists of any persuasion, human research with psychedelics ended abruptly in the early 1970's due to public health concerns of widespread illicit use, combined with the political climate of the time, especially the civil unrest resulting from opposition to the war in Vietnam. Up until then, psychedelics were for decades the most intensively studied drugs in psychiatry.

My own research interest in psychedelics was driven by a desire to understand the biological basis of mystical experience, although the experiments themselves partook, and stayed within the bounds, of traditional clinical research models. The drug that drew my interest the most was DMT, or dimethyltryptamine.

DMT is, chemically, the simplest psychedelic known; closely related to melatonin and serotonin. It is widespread in both tropical and non-tropical plants. Chemical analyses of psychedelic Amazon snuffs revealed the presence of DMT, but it was not until several decades later that researchers discovered its psychedelic properties.

Failing to convince Switzerland's Sandoz Laboratories to ship their LSD across the Iron Curtain in the 1950s, Hungarian psychiatrist Stephen Szara synthesized some DMT, hoping its presence in those snuffs meant it was psychedelic. He was correct, and quickly established how powerful a mind-altering compound it is.12 Even more exciting was DMT's discovery in human blood and brain by scientists searching for a natural LSD-like substance that might cause naturally-occurring psychoses.13

In reviewing the scientific literature, I became convinced that DMT might also be involved in naturally-occurring mystical experience. There are likely as many similarities between the psychedelic and mystical states, as between psychedelic and psychotic ones.

References

1. Csikszentmihalyi, Mihaly (1991) Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience. Harper-Collins, San Francisco, CA.

2. Strassman, Rick J (1995): Hallucinogenic drugs in psychiatric research and treatment: Perspectives and prospects. Journal of Nervous and Mental Disease 183, 127-138.

3. Strassman, Rick (2000): DMT: The Spirit Molecule, A Doctor's Revolutionary Research into the Biology of Near-Death and Mystical Experiences. Park Street Press, Rochester, VT.

4. Jamison, Kay Redfield (1993): UI. Simon and Schuster, New York. 370 pages.

5. Nasar, Sylvia (1998): A Beautiful Mind: A Biography of John Forbes Nash, Jr. Simon & Schuster, New York.

6. LSD is usually called a "lysergamide" psychedelic, but also contains a tryptamine nucleus.

7. Current thinking is that LSD and other psychedelics affect the neurotransmitter serotonin. Nevertheless, the gap between brain function and conscious experience remains vast. How serotonin levels translate into a depressed thought, for example, is unknown. We still require valid and practical non-biological models for psychedelics' action, such as psychological or spiritual ones.

8. Böszörményi, Zoltán (1960): "Creative urge as an after effect of model psychoses". Confinia Psychiatrica 3, 117-126.

9. Zegans, Leonard S; Pollard, John C; Brown, Douglas (1967): "The effects of LSD-25 on creativity and tolerance to regression". Archives of General Psychiatry 16, 740-749.

10. Dobkin de Rios, Marlene (2003): LSD, Spirituality, and the Creative Process. Inner Traditions/Bear & Co., Rochester, VT. Two of these images may be viewed at: http://www.hofmann.org/cgi-bin/hofmann/tour.cgi?art=kachina5a.jpg&title=Kachina+Doll+Painting+1 and http://www.hofmann.org/cgi-bin/hofmann/tour.cgi?art=kachina5b.jpg&title=Kachina+Doll+Painting+2

11. Harman, Willis W; McKim, Robert H; Mogar, Robert E; Fadiman, James; Stolaroff, Myron J (1966): "Psychedelic agents in creative problem solving: A pilot study". Psychological Reports 19, 211-227.

12. Szara, Stephen (1989): "The social chemistry of discovery: the DMT story". Social Pharmacology 3, 237-248.

13. Studies demonstrating that the brain uses crucial energy reserves to draw DMT into itself raise even more intriguing questions about DMT's role in consciousness. DMT may play a part in the maintenance or creation of our normal version of reality, something like an internally generated "matrix."